According to the media, academia and governments of the West, the destruction of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed were caused by Slobodan Milosevic, who was engaged in a grand conspiracy to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia. The purpose of this site is to tell the truth about how Yugoslavia broke up and the subsequent wars, and expose the lies and inherent contradictions of the official narrative.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Myth: The 1989 amendments to Serbia’s constitution affected in a negative way the rights of the Albanians of Kosovo.

FACT: The Albanians of Kosovo continued to have exactly the same cultural and national rights after the amendments to the constitution of Serbia as before. The amendments, as the (Albanian-dominated) Provincial Committee of the League of Communists of Kosovo concluded on February 28th 1989, “[did] not jeopardise the autonomy of the provinces or the equality among peoples and minorities” (http://www.milosevic-trial.org/trial/2004-12-01.htm) Amendment 27, for example, explicitly stated that “the languages of nationalities shall be in equal official and public use in the territories of the Autonomous Provinces”, (http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/050120IT.htm) and Kosovo Albanians continued to have full cultural autonomy and rights as a nationality of Yugoslavia.

The idea that these amendments were anti-Albanian or negatively affected Albanian rights does not even make sense. One of the members of the Constitutional Commission that prepared the amendments, Professor Surija Popovci, was a Kosovo Albanian, and he appeared on television prior to the 23rd March session of the Kosovo Assembly, which overwhelmingly agreed to the amendments, to declare his support for them (http://www.milosevic-trial.org/trial/2002-02-19.htm). Prominent Albanian leaders such as Sinan Hasani, then Kosovo’s representative on the Presidency of Yugoslavia and a former President and Vice-President of the Presidency of Yugoslavia, and the Albanian leaders of the Kosovo Communist Party and government, also all supported the amendments. (http://www.milosevic-trial.org/trial/2004-12-01.htm) Is this at all consistent with the notion that they rescinded or restricted the rights of the Albanian people?